Why are there so many Hui people in Cangzhou, Hebei?

Cangzhou, Hebei Province, won the favor of Hui people, showing that it was the largest salt industry base in China in the Yuan Dynasty. The commercial resources allocated by hand are naturally favored by semu people who are good at doing business (mainly Muslim foreign businessmen in Central Asia and West Asia). More importantly, the land and water transportation conditions in Cangzhou are very developed. The unique conditions made Muslim businessmen from Central Asia and West Asia, who were subjects of the Great Yuan Empire at that time, flock to Cangzhou to settle down and do business.

Cangzhou was favored by Muslim merchants in the Yuan Dynasty, forming some areas where Hui ancestors gathered. However, with the great war at the end of Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of Ming Dynasty, Cangzhou, as a traffic artery, was naturally severely devastated by the war. In A.D. 1367, Chang Yuchun, a general under Zhu Yuanzhang, went all the way up the Grand Canal to Fayuan and reached the capital. The death caused by the war led to a sharp drop in the overall population of Cangzhou at that time, and the Hui population also suffered heavy losses. In this context, Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor of the world, began a large-scale immigration activity. At that time, the gathering place of Semu people around the Yuan Dynasty belonged to areas with many Hui people, and the purpose of migration was mostly concentrated in the surrounding areas of Beijing. Cangzhou, a region with a tradition of gathering Hui people, has naturally received special attention.

By the time of Judy, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Cangzhou had experienced the baptism of war, but it once again became the suburb of the imperial city. During the period of 1404, the floating population in Shandong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Anhui, Hubei and other provinces came in an endless stream. It can be said that this migration of Rebecca belongs to the ethnic regional choice in political migration, and it is also the foundation stone event to promote the Hui population to settle in Cangzhou today. When Hui people from southern provinces come to Beiping for the first time, they will naturally choose Cangzhou, a region of the same clan, to live together. With the historical foundation of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, under the psychological guidance of Hui people returning to one family, the population of Hui people who came to Cangzhou for various reasons increased day by day in the following hundreds of years.

Nowadays, most of these Hui people have formed a distribution pattern of large dispersion and small settlement in Cangzhou. On the basis of ethnic equality and respect for freedom of belief, Cangzhou has also established Mengcun Hui Autonomous County, which has become one of the six minority autonomous counties in Hebei Province.